Leviathan Falls

My review for the last book of The Expanse saga. A bombastic finale that ends things with a nice knot. I really enjoyed it!

So, The Expanse is over, at last, and I will probably write a different post talking about the whole series and my thoughts overall. For now, these are only my thoughts on the last book, let’s get to them, after the summary!

The Laconian Empire has fallen, setting the thirteen hundred solar systems free from the rule of Winston Duarte. But the ancient enemy that killed the gate builders is awake, and the war against our universe has begun again.

In the dead system of Adro, Elvi Okoye leads a desperate scientific mission to understand what the gate builders were and what destroyed them, even if it means compromising herself and the half-alien children who bear the weight of her investigation. Through the wide-flung systems of humanity, Colonel Aliana Tanaka hunts for Duarte’s missing daughter. . . and the shattered emperor himself. And on the Rocinante, James Holden and his crew struggle to build a future for humanity out of the shards and ruins of all that has come before.

As nearly unimaginable forces prepare to annihilate all human life, Holden and a group of unlikely allies discover a last, desperate chance to unite all of humanity, with the promise of a vast galactic civilization free from wars, factions, lies, and secrets if they win.

But the price of victory may be worse than the cost of defeat.

This book is the last stand and as such, it had a lot of things going on and it has to deal with bringing closure to plenty of plotlines. This book goes rather fast, introducing a character we already know as the main antagonist of the whole ordeal. Except we also have a returning antagonist and of course the alien menace that wants to destroy all of Humanity!

Somehow—and this is the first chapter of the book but a spoiler if you haven’t read the previous book!—Duarte has managed to regain a certain consciousness. And just like that, he has managed to vanish from Laconia, escaping through unknown means towards the ring gates.

With pretty much no clue as to where he went, Trejo—Laconia’s very, very tired interim leader—gives Colonel Tanaka—featured in the first book of the last trilogy—ultimate authority for a mission to find him. Of course, through her perspective we will discover a rather interesting character with a lot of problems and a temperament that is not particularly pleasant. All she cares about is the mission, but we will soon find out about her secrets, and how these will intertwine and clash with her decisiones and behaviour as the story moves forward.

Elvi is the one who ended up in charge of every investigation regarding alien technology for the Laconian Empire, and with the help of some friends, they’ll be doing their best to decipher the mystery behind the aliens who built the ring gates, as well as clues as to how to defeat the aliens that remain, the ones who have caused Humanity to go unconscious and some ships to go Dutchman or be torn apart in strange ways. There will also be some interesting chatter about what science is willing to do for the sake of knowledge and the like here.

Through Naomi, Holden and Alex, we will follow the Rocinante as they live a life as fugitives alongside Teresa Duarte, the newest teenage crewmate in the ship—actually two counting her dog!—who happens to be the heir to the Empire’s throne and their main shield against the Laconian ships utterly destroying them on sight. Each of these characters will go through some interesting challenges, with Naomi as the leader of the underground, managing 1300 little groups, Jim Holden dealing with his trauma and the stress of making hard decisions for the sake of others, and Alex being separated from his family and keeping the Rocinante afloat.

Teresa will be an interesting view point, due to her advanced education yet her lack of experience and young eyes. Being on the run, she learns to embrace her place in the Rocinante, plus some engineering thanks to Amos, who continues to treat her as a normal kid despite himself being very much not a normal human anymore, which the others still struggle with. Of course, she also has to deal with the fact her father is a crazy person living a power fantasy, and that pretty much everybody is after her.

Another new point of view will be that of Kit, Alex’s son, who has a pretty personal and human story, where he’s trying to do his best to provide for his wife and their young baby, while taking on a trip for new opportunities on a different planet. As normal as this sounds, there will be quite a lot of drama going on here too, and I ended up caring quite a bit for the wellbeing of everybody here.

This has way too many plots going on at the same time, and the stakes are as big as ever, we get to see glimpses of cosmic scale stuff. We will go to a couple places, meet some characters under dire circumstances, do a lot of epic ship manouvers and combat and space wars and the like. The conflict between the underground and Laconian and the alien entities will be something to behold!

Despite everything, I think the book sticks the landing rather well. It does leave me with a lot of questions, but you can sort of guess how things would go from there, and that’s perfectly okay.

I will now provide a list with some spoilered complaints and moments I found weird, which is something I didn’t do for the previous books, but anyway.

Some spoilers and rambley thoughts

I feel like bringing Duarte back was a very weird decision that undermined a lot of the previous novel. A part of me feels like he wasn’t truly necessary and I don’t particularly enjoy what he does. However, he does move the plot forward.
The idea of leaving Teresa in some random school should not have even crossed their minds. Like, isn’t facial recognition a thing? It should not have gone that wrong.
Tanaka is way too crazy for an antagonist, like, it’s hard to think of her as an actual human that exists. So many of her decisions are questionable for a leader, especially after the class she seemed to have on the first novel. The one thing she did well was giving everyone pills to withstand the mind control.
That said, having some pills that are capable of resisting the hivemind feels a bit flakey, like I’m not sure it’s something that should have worked at all.
Having Duarte take charge against the resistance with the hivemind instead the evil alien entities doing something felt weird to me, I was not super satisfied with how being primates instead of jellyfish actually helps.
I do like how the fact we keep using the gates helps to “confuse” the aliens and fool them into thinking their experiment didn’t work even though they did manage to kill a whole solar system with humans on it.
The hive mind of Humanity kind of feels like the finale of another novel which I won’t mention here but I read it, also like a certain anime which I won’t mention either.
One of the questions I wish I had answers for was Cara and Xan. It seems like Cara was getting addicted to the experiments but I don’t see how that would necessarily damage her any further if they had done a few more experiemnts you know?
Ghost Miller coming back was absolutely epic for me, it worked and I loved it and it was nice to see him once again.
I really enjoyed seeing Amos being epic in the faraway future, very cool stuff.
I miss these characters so much already, what happened to Alex and his family? Naomi is pretty much alone again, though I guess she’d adopt Teresa as a sort of future leaer along Amos or something, or just help her live a normal teenage life while things are rebuilt.
I actually don’t care that much about all of these comments, I really loved the book as what it is and how it ties things and I enjoy that they didn’t answer quite a lot of things.